an apparently empty one.
The burbling fountains absorbed the sounds of clopping hooves. There should have been staff milling about, readying the house for the day ahead. The foreboding silence crackled against Niko’s skin. He swiftly dismounted Adamo and followed the tiled walkways into the gardens. Perhaps everyone was sleeping off the night’s merriment. But the silence didn’t feel like the slumbering kind, it felt like the kind Niko had walked through after a battle. The silence that was left after the storm had passed.
He jogged down a set of steps, deeper into the garden, with its neatly trimmed hedges and tiled, intersecting pathways.
This wasn’t right. Houses like this were never silent.
Niko reached the main fountain. Wine glasses and tankards sat on their sides, as though the people who had attended the gathering had merely stepped away for a moment.
Broken glass crunched under Niko’s boots. He glanced down at the scattered glass twinkling in the sunlight. Yasir approached, his boots disturbing a thin layer of dust.
Kneeling, Niko clutched a handful of the grey dust and sifted it through his fingers. Ash. But what had burned?
His stomach dropped. Not what.
He bolted from the fountain, up the main stairs, where the shah and his wife had descended the previous evening to join their guests. Ash had gathered in corners, like sand blown in from the desert. It quietly shifted around Niko’s passing.
He dashed through the columned hallways, checking chambers for signs of life.
“Niko?!” Yasir had his pistol palmed as he caught up. “What happened here?”
It couldn’t be real, could it? All those people…
He checked doorway after doorway but was met with more silence and soot.
“We should leave…” Yasir said.
A motionless body lay facedown in the corridor ahead, his hand reaching toward a window overlooking the ocean. Niko knelt at the man’s side and checked for a pulse at his clammy, cool neck. Fluttering touched his fingertips. He rolled him on his side and met his grandfather’s veined, weeping eyes. The old man’s pale lips moved, but no words escaped. His hand trembled, reaching for Niko’s face, but then he dropped it and swept up Niko’s hand instead, folding the Yazdan ring into it.
“Who did this?” Niko cradled the man’s head.
The shah’s gaze fogged over. His lips still moved, chanting the same thing over and over. Niko lifted the shah close. “Who did this?” he whispered into the shah’s ear, clutching the frail man close. The shah paused and whispered a single, clear word.
“Caville.”
The shah’s body loosened, falling limp in Niko’s arms, becoming hollow as his life left him. Niko lay the man down—his grandfather—and staggered to his feet.
“What did he say?” Yasir scanned the gardens.
Ash-strewn corridors. The dead devoured.
The dark flame had washed through the Yazdan house, consuming everything it touched like it had that day in the Caville palace under Talos’s control.
All those people.
Hundreds.
Gone.
“We need to leave,” Niko snapped. “Now.”
They retreated to the horses and galloped from the grounds, only slowing once the house was out of sight and Seran’s busy streets embraced them once more. The color and noise and life didn’t feel real, and Niko walked Adamo through it, his mind cold and quiet.
“Niko, what’s going on?” Yasir reined up alongside. “Will you answer me?”
Amir. It had to be because the alternative was a thousand times worse.
They couldn’t go back to the townhouse. If Amir had taken Vasili, the risk was too great.
“Your ship.” Niko pulled Adamo toward the docks. “We’ll talk there.”
They tied the horses alongside the crates waiting dockside at Walla’s Heart and climbed abroad.
“Dismiss your men.”
Yasir hesitated but obeyed, giving his crew the day off as he cautiously eyed Niko. When they were finally alone on deck, Yasir turned to Niko, “What the fuck happened back there?”
He grabbed Yasir’s arm and hauled him into the cabin. The ship rocked gently beneath his feet, or perhaps he was unsteady because of what he was about to reveal. “They’re all dead.”
“The shah is… Shit… If anyone saw us. We should report it—”
“No, Yasir.” His head ached, the images swirling around and around. “They’re all dead.”
“What?”
“The Yazdans. Everyone. It must have happened after we left.”
“What happened?”
“The dark flame. It consumed them. I’ve seen it before with Talos, but not on that scale.” He propped a hip against Yasir’s desk and rubbed at the bridge of his nose.
Yasir snorted a laugh. “That’s impossible.”
“The ash, Yasir. You must have seen it. That’s all that’s left.”
The color drained from the captain’s face. He flopped into his chair, suddenly silent. “Why?”
“Because they were Yazdans,